Gregg Popovich was close to cutting Danny Green last year

The San Antonio Spurs lost a heartbreaker in Game 6 against the Miami Heat on Tuesday night, but they still have another chance to win an NBA title in Game 7 on Thursday night. If not for the stellar shooting of Danny Green throughout the series, LeBron James would already be living up to the name that these sneakers have given him.

Earlier this week, former Brooklyn Nets coach Avery Johnson had a discussion with Stephen A. Smith on ESPN’s “First Take” about how the Spurs came extremely close to cutting Green.

“I remember with the Nets, Billy King and I, we were trying convince Pop to cut Danny Green so we could bring him at the time to New Jersey,” Johnson said, via Nets Daily. “And Pop said if he has one more bad game we’re going to cut him and he made a bunch of threes in this one particular game and he kept him.”

In the words of Stephen A., the Spurs are incredibly lucky that Johnson’s attempt to “hoodwink” Gregg Popovich fell through. Nets Daily speculates that the game Green might have saved his job in San Antonio was on January 7, 2012, when he went 3-for-4 from beyond the arc and scored 24 points in 33 minutes.

We have no way of knowing if Pop was actually going to cut Green or if he was just messing around. What we do know is that Green drained another three on Tuesday, stretching his record to 26 three-pointers made in a playoff series. Hopefully for Miami’s sake, Chris Bosh takes the same approach with Green in Game 7 that he took in Game 6.